> BlogIf you are a Facebook user you will know all about ‘Like’ buttons, which allow your “friends” to see things such as Facebook pages, online articles, businesses etc that you ‘like’. It’s a bit like non directly recommending a business or service to your friends; It’s only human to be intrigued into finding out more about what your friends ‘like’ and that’s why this system works so well for businesses utilising Facebook buttons and such like.
What would we think if Google introduced a similar button though? What if anyone could ‘rate’ your website for other users to see on Google? Wouldn’t that affect the way that we all choose pages to visit from Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s)? Here we look a bit further into these questions.
Firstly – Google are experimenting with a similar button, it’s currently called “+1” and will allow anyone to basically ‘rate’ your website with the simple click of a button. Google are calling this button the digital shorthand for ‘this is pretty cool’.
Secondly – It is likely that it will have some effect on the sites that we all visit from SERP’s, however how much so is difficult to say. We all have slightly different browsing methods and what one person thinks is worthy of a “+1” you might not agree with. There is also another way at looking at it, and that is that sites appearing in SERP’s that perhaps shouldn’t e.g. content farms will less likely get “+1”’s assigned to them and therefore SERP’s will become more and more relevant to the user.
Thirdly – Whilst this service is still in Google Labs you will need to sign up for +1 via your Google Account and you will need an upgraded public Google profile. Likewise to see these +1 results you will need to be signed into your Google Account. Within your Google Account all of your +1’s will be stored which you can make public or keep private. As time goes on and you need/want to delete past +1’s you will have the ability to do so.
If you are a website owner and you would like a +1 button added to your site, in much the same way as a Facebook “Like” button or Twitter ‘Retweet” button you can sign up for this also, although they are yet to be released. Google are advising via their +1 button FAQ that “you should add the button only to public, crawlable pages on your site.”
Whilst recent social search changes in Google have really only affected information showing in organic search results, this time it’s a little bit different because Google AdWords are going to have +1 buttons. These will serve the same purpose as those next to organic search results.
An interesting thing to note though is that in the above AdWords blog link, Google admit that “+1s will be one of many signals we use to calculate organic search ranking”. So I imagine as Google gather more data over time about how these +1’s affect search quality, the +1 button will become more and more important to your Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing efforts.
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